2024 Salzburg Festival: Between heaven and hell

This year's Salzburg Festival will feature 172 performances over 44 days in 15 venues, drawing an expected quarter-million visitors from around the world. (Last year, despite wars and crises, 79 nations were counted in Salzburg, 40 of which were non-European). More than 1,500 artists — including the biggest stars of the opera and theater industry — make up the program, conceived and coordinated by an international team led by artistic director Markus Hinterhäuser.

This year's theme: 'Between heaven and hell'

The festival management presented the program back in December 2023: 10 opera productions and just as many theater productions, flanked by numerous concerts, exhibitions and discussion events.

"The works of the 2024 festival summer trace movements between heaven and hell," is how Hinterhäuser describes his basic idea; they aim to tell the audience "about the elemental beauty of the infinite as well as the 'demonic' abysses hidden within it, about immeasurable loneliness and dizzying godless freedom."

Five of the 10 festival operas will be presented purely as concert performances, that is, without staging. Rumor has it this is intended to prepare the audience for the period from 2027, when extensive renovation of the Salzburg Festival venues is due to begin. This will then be a "truly exceptional situation," says Hinterhäuser — one that won't be his to deal with, but rather a concern for his as-yet-unnamed successor as festival director.

Those concert performances kick off on July 26 with Richard Strauss' "Capriccio," a one-act opera set in the Rococo period. Christian Thielemann will conduct the festival orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic.

Mozart's "Don Giovanni" follows just two days later.

Teodor Currentzis will conduct the acclaimed and criticized production by Italian director Romeo Castellucci from 2022, in which a luxury car plops down on the stage of the Great Festival Hall. The Greek-born conductor with a Russian passport, who has been criticized for his silence on the war in Ukraine, will conduct his Utopia orchestra, which was founded in the West.

From Don Giovanni, the tragic womanizer, we move on to other characters grappling with their demons and who, according to Hinterhäuser, "rebel against a world in which they cannot find their way." They include various Dostoyevsky characters, whether in "The Idiot," an opera by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, or in "The Gambler" by Sergei Prokofiev. 

Among the highlights of the concert program is the series "Time With Schönberg," in honor of the 150th anniversary of composer Arnold Schönberg's birth in September 2024.

Theater in Salzburg: Beyond the mainstream

While the opera segment of the festival may be conservative in a typically Salzburg manner, the straight theater programming features bold propositions.

This year marks the debut of the new head of the drama section, Marina Davydova. The leading Russian theater critic and director, previously artistic director of festivals such as the Vienna Festival Weeks, was brought onto the Salzburg team two years ago.

Because Davydova had immediately taken a radical stance against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, her position at the Salzburg Festival is seen as an important gesture of solidarity for all Russian artists who oppose the war.

Speaking to DW shortly before the opening of the festival, Davydova said her aim in (re)designing the drama program was to move away "from the traditional German straight theater tradition with its Bertolt Brecht-influenced gestures." And thus away from the mainstream of the numerous German-language stages.

Davydova particularly highlighted the work of Polish director Krystian Lupa, who is staging Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" in collaboration with the Jaunimo Theater Vilnius.

The great opera innovator Robert Carsen is commissioned with producing this year's "Jedermann," the Salzburg staple, which also has explosive potential. And Michael Maertens, who shone as the main character in "Jedermann" last year, will this year be reading from Alexei Navalny's letters from prison. Navalny's widow, Yulia Navalnaya, is expected to attend the event.

Nina Khrushcheva: sober and respectful analysis of Russia

The fate of Russia and Europe is the central theme for this year's opening speaker Nina Khrushcheva. Born in Moscow and living in New York, the great-granddaughter of former Soviet Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev is considered an expert on contemporary Russian history and is one of the most astute critics of the Putin regime — and also of the West, with its contradictory reactions to events in Russia.

In an interview with Konstantin von Eggert from DW Russian, Khrushcheva compared the current "occupation of the Kremlin spectacle" to a "jar full of spiders. Only the spiders are actually quite small — but they try to pretend to be big." This makes the situation all the more dangerous.

At the same time, Nina Khrushcheva calls for a respectful approach to Russian culture. The power of Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment" or Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" lies, according to Nina Khrushcheva, "certainly in the fact that they provide insights into human nature in general and not just into the Russian soul. In any case, refusing to engage with Russian culture will not change Putin's mind or force him to withdraw his troops from Ukraine. But it would cut off a potential source of information about his goals and motivations."

This article was originally published in German.